Yes, it appears that the Low Quality Content
Tsunami is slowly seeping into popular consciousness. We are staring into the
black abyss of low quality texts, to which translators must add a multilingual
layer of Low Quality Translations to complete the Literary Sandwich of
the Future.

Picture yourself, for instance, relaxing
next to a Caribbean beach while using your smartphone to post-edit a
masterpiece by Israeli Nobel-Prize-winning pyscologist Daniel Kahneman, Fast and Slow Thinking. Life is easy.
The sun is shining. Solicitous waiters bring you a healthy lunch silently, so
as not to disturb you.

Wait, no. Rewind. It turns out that Daniel
Kahneman’s best seller is called Thinking,
Fast and Slow. What you are post-editing is a deceptively similar tome
written by an entity called “Karl Daniels”. See what the scumbag Conent
Tsunami-ers did there by choosing a fake name that sounds sneakily like
Kahneman’s? Unfortunately, the book is no longer available from Amazon (I could
KICK myself! However, Google Books managed to at least salvage some memory of
this oeuvre in its vast Babelian library).
The non-Nobel book, according to Geoffrey Pullum of the Language
Log, is:

a
compilation of snippets from Wikipedia articles and the like, dressed up like a
book. Edited by robots for you to buy by mistake. It's a spam book, part of the
"gigantic, unstoppable tsunami of what can only be described as
bookspam"

Yes, the world has been enriched by this
book by about the same degree as it has been by all those Nigerian scam emails.

But wait, Hal Karl Daniels isn’t the
only binary brain that has been busily recycling low quality content to add to
the giant tidal wave of information that is going to make us all rich and
enlightened. Perhaps you can apply your post-editing chops to the little
reports produced by a company called ICON Publishing in San Diego founded by a
computer science professor called Philip Parker (Is automated publishing the
future?):

Parker's
production costs are only 23 cents per book because they're made by computers. Algorithms
search through incredible amounts of data from published research and
government reports. That info is then plugged into a book format. It's kind of
like a very high tech form of Mad Libs. Parker came up with the idea in the
'90s when he was writing economic reports.

Oh, wait, the book cost 23 cents to make.
Not per word. I mean the WHOLE ENTIRE book cost 23 cents to make. It is highly
unlikely that anyone will pay even $0.01 per word to translate it, which is
close to below subsistence level in most countries on Earth. So scratch that
opportunity. On to the next thing.

Heard about the recent spate of flash
crashes driven by stock trading algorithms? Well, it seems that the computer
programs that feed on news and use them as signals for buying and selling might
be taking their cues from other
computers. Which is always reassuring when you mention computers and gynormous
amounts of money. Ever heard of the phrase feedback loop? This is from a recent article by Evgeny Morozov ("A Robot Stole my Pulitzer"):

Forbes—one
of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company
called Narrative Science to automatically generate online articles about what
to expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it some
statistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readable
stories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificial
intelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.”Don't
miss the irony here: Automated platforms are now “writing” news reports about
companies that make their money from automated trading. These reports are
eventually fed back into the financial system, helping the algorithms to spot
even more lucrative deals. Essentially, this is journalism done by robots and
for robots. The only upside here is that humans get to keep all the cash.

Maybe Narrative Science needs a couple of
financial translators moonlighting as post-editors? Once again, though, the
production cost of the source text is so negligible as to make out-and-out raw
MT the likeliest candidate for translation.

If you truly expect binary recursiveness to
feed you, perhaps you can write to the company that published Computer Game Bot Turing Test and
propose your services as a post-editor into Spanish or French for this instant
classic. Computer engineer Carlos Bueno describes the book as follows (I am indebted
to Spanish IT translation über-geek @jordibal for this
anecdote):

Let
me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of
over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia
articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher,
Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.It
gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon
Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars
no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic
absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about
computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have
used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed
and read.

But take heart, not all low quality content
is attributable to computers. Last week it was reported that China had censored
the sex scene in the 3-D version of Titanic.
Many online news outlets (Daily Mail, MSNBC, Entertainment Weekly, E Online…) included
a statement from the Chinese Ministry justifying the move thusly:

"Considering
the vivid 3D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for a
touch and thus interrupt other people's viewing. To avoid potential conflicts
between viewers and out of consideration of building a harmonious ethical
social environment, we've decided to cut off the nudity scenes."

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Danny:No, venti is twenty. Large is large. In
fact, tall is large and grande is Spanish for large. Venti is the only one that
doesn't mean large. It's also the only one that's Italian. Congratulations,
you're stupid in three languages.

Barista:A venti is a large coffee.

Danny:Really? Says who? Fellini? Do you accept
lira or is it all euros now?

—Role Model (2010)

The State of McLocalization 2012. Exhibit A: I see an Internet job
ad entitled: "Spanish translators with Catalan and Castellano dialects are
needed ASAP." An ad calling for a Spanish translator who speaks Castellano
of course piques my curiosity. Greater delights awaited me. I kid you not, this
is what the ad said: "We have text in English and Spanish that should be
translated into Catalan and Castellano." Spanish to Castellano. The
wonders of the Web 2.0. The person who posted the ad helpfully adds a couple of
linguistic notes taken from the Monty Python Book of Flying Dialectology: "Castellano
is a kind of Spanish which includes dialects at the central and north part of
Spain (the area from Cantabria to Cuenca)." I omit the notes on Catalan
because it describes the language as a “dialect” and I don't want the comments setion inundated with people making threatening comments.

Let me start to unpack this monstrosity by beginning with the familiar
term of “Castilian Spanish.” Most people who use “Castilian Spanish” probably
think it sounds a little more fancy or scientific than “European Spanish” or “Iberian
Spanish” or the clunky “Spanish from Spain.” But steer clear from the
jackass who uses this phrase, gentle reader, because an agency that uses it to
recruit translators may also have trouble figuring out the complexities of
international wire transfers, whether willfully or not. That
person/agency/spambot is affecting an erudition that he/she/it does not really
possess.

But, wait, “Castilian Spanish” is endorsed by a source as eminent
as Wikipedia. Read this page:

Castilian
Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can
vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the
variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the
language standard for radio and TV speakers.[1][2][3][4] The region where this
variety of Spanish is spoken corresponds more or less to the Castilian
historical region.

No, no, no, no. Bad Wikipedia! Bad Wikipedia! Naughty, naughty Wikipedia!
You went and urinated on the living room rug of knowledge again! The exact
meaning of “Castilian Spanish” does NOT “vary even in that language.” No one uses
the term “español castellano.” Why? Because he would be branded a jackass. Okay, I’m only going to say this once. Saying “Castilian
Spanish” is just an economic way of proclaiming that a grandfather or
great-grandfather deflowered a cousin somewhere in the adjacent branches of
your family tree. It is the same as using the term “Tuscan Italian” or “Anglican
English” or “Gallic French” or “Sino-Chinese” or “Nippon Japanese” or “Teutonic
German.” It is a nonsense term used by Scientologists, Pataphysicists, conspiracy
theorists, and sundry varieties of idiot who believe in the Singularity. Think
of the funny made-up Roman names used in the Life of Brian, such as “Maximus Minimus”.

Castilian is the language spoken in the north-central region of
Spain that spread via the Reconquista and the political ascendancy of Castile to
the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, thus becoming the primary language of
literature and government in what would eventually become Spain (sometimes in
an uneasy and fraught cohabitation with other languages [careful: not dialects] such as Basque and Catalan).
Later on, it also spread to the Americas and even the Philippines through the,
er, free Spanish courses taught by those stabby, trigger-happy language tutors
known as conquistadores. Castilian is just an old name for standard Spanish,
whether spoken in Buenos Aires or Mexico City or Barcelona (or even Copenhagen,
for that matter). The Castilian dialect, on the other hand, refers to the
peculiarities of the Spanish spoken in rural areas of Castile, where this
entire story started.

Visit these (correct) definitions to get a sense of what I’m
talking about:

Cas·til·ian
[ka-stil-yuhn] noun 1. the
dialect of Spanish spoken in Castile. 2. the
official standard form of the Spanish language as spoken in Spain, based on
this dialect. 3. a native
or inhabitant of Castile.

Castilian1 a native of
Castile. 2 the dialect
of Spanish spoken in Castile, which is standard Spanish.adjectiveof or
relating to Castile, Castilians, or the Castilian form of Spanish.

Therefore, if you insist on using the term “Castilian Spanish”, it
can only refer to the Spanish spoken in the Castile region, which by the same
token will exclude the Spanish spoken in other
regions of Spain, which doesn’t make any sense when you are recruiting translators
(who localizes only for Castile?). To sum it up, if you stress the “Castilian”
in “Castilian Spanish”, you exclude
the rest of Spain. And if you stress the “Spanish” in “Castilian Spanish” (to distinguish it from Latin
American Spanish), you get to the insane situation whereby Latin Americans
speak Castilian and Spanish, but not
Castilian Spanish. In any case, the conceptual difficulties you can get into by
simply raising the term “Castilian” are thorny. Better to simply avoid using it
and stick to safer terms such as “Iberian Spanish” or “European Spanish,”
neither of which requires a doctorate in comparative philology. Yeah, I know “Castilian”
sounds fancy, but everybody hurts sometime.

Now, the job ad quoted at the beginning takes the “Castilian/Spanish/Castilian
Spanish” idiocy one step further and totally dissociates español from castellano and
asks for a translator to work a text from one to the other. That is the equivalent
of asking someone to translate from Quebecois to Canadian French or from English
into “American.” This marks a step further in the divorce between Spanish and Castilian,
similar to a fight between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or between Bruce Banner and
the Hulk. Which is an extreme, relatively unstudied phase of multiple personality
disorder.

The agency posting this is Ukrainian (the ad, sadly, was erased before I managed to save it). An autopsy of the way in
which a project from English to Spanish came to be handled by an agency in that
region of the world would perhaps provide an interesting radiography of why
there are so many poor translations out there.

Rant over. (Whew, it felt good to get that off my chest.)

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based
in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity
research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a
translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and
H.B.O. International, as well as several small brokerages and asset management
companies. To contact him, visit his website and
write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network
by visiting the profile or follow
him on Twitter.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Last week, two articles on highly
successful musicians provided contrasting glimpses into the technology behind music
production in our times. First up was an interesting piece from The New Yorker on what we might call the
new Brill Building or the new Tinpan Alley: the dozen or so teams of
song producers and writers that are responsible for the vast majority of the
hits that dominate the American pop music scene. Fifty years ago, popular
musicians didn’t write their own stuff. Their managers simply had them sing
songs that professional songwriters churned out like sausages in places like
the Brill in New York. Look at the first Beatles and Rolling Stones albums: not
a single original composition. That is the world that Bob Dylan blew away.
Carole King is the sole survivor of that bygone era. She began as a gun for
hire with her husband and later successfully made the transition into the
singer-songwriter era of the sixties and seventies who sang her own material.

Now, in the era of the Content Tsunami, "the times they are a-changin' back." A tiny group of twenty or so professional songwriters is once again churning out the Top 40 hits that account for the bulk of music sales. They use very simple formulas:

...today’s
Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops,
and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the
voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music sounds
sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah
pah pah.

The songs are written according to a
template that relies heavily on so-called “hooks,” the repetitive parts that
captivate the listener—who apparently has the attention span of a fruit fly. As if older pop music was not repetitive or catchy
enough. (Seriously, how much more catchy will pop have to get in the future? I imagine
a couple of hands reaching out from a smartphone screen, grabbing you by the
lapels and shaking you while a voice shouts: “Dance, bitch!”):

The
producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the
“synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with
primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical
phrases that lock you into the song.

In this age of alleged media diversification,
a handful of individuals are responsible for the listening pleasures of
millions. In fact, so tiny and influential is this elite that one song written
for Beyoncé, “Halo,” ended up being used by Kelly Clarkson (“Already Gone”) before
the duplication was noticed… and both became hits!

The process of writing cookie-cutter songs,
unsurprisingly, relies heavily on high technology:

Eriksen
worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while
Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits
of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and
rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the
space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s
sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and
lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five
years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.

For a contrast, last week also saw the publication of a New York Times feature on Jack White, formerly of the
White Stripes, a major figure in the rock’n’roll that was displaced by this
resurgence of the Top 40s hit machine.

White sounds like a post-industrial
romantic who is knee-deep into the resurgence of vinyl. His record company’s
slogan is that “Your Turntable’s not Dead”:

“It’s a really beautiful process,” White said. At the labeling
station, an employee handed him a pressing of an old Robert Johnson LP that was
being rereleased, and he weighed it in his hand. “That’s killer,” he said.
“It’s not as heavy as mine, though. I’ve got the real one.” White
calls LPs “the pinnacle of musical expression.” “I was talking to Robert Altman
before he died,” he said, “and I asked him about an interview where he said
that he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. He
said: ‘I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. With
videotape or digital, I have no idea what’s going on.’ That’s how I feel about
vinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel,
and you’re just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, you
get a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced. I think there’s a
romance to that.”

Later on, the author of the piece describes White’s radically retro style of song production:

White
thinks of computer programs like Pro Tools as “cheating.” He records only in
analog, never digital, and edits his tape with a razor blade. “It’s sort of
like I can’t be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle,”
he said. “The funny thing is, even musicians and producers, my peers, don’t
care. Like, ‘Wow, that’s great, Jack.’ Big deal.”It’s
easy to overlook amid the stylistic trappings, but White is a virtuoso —
possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation. His best songs, like “Seven
Nation Army,” are firmly rooted in the American folk vernacular, yet catchy and
durable enough to be chanted in sports arenas worldwide. That he does it with
such self-imposed constraints — for instance, his favorite guitar in the White
Stripes was made of plastic and came from Montgomery Ward — makes it all the
more impressive.

I will not attempt to drive a ten-ton
truck through this stylistic difference or to construct some facile analogy
about highbrow hipster retro and mass-market, tech-driven commercialism. I am
perhaps a snob, but not at least in musical terms. My tastes are pretty
Catholic insofar as pop is concerned. A peek at my iPod reveals a catalogue
that ranges from the artsiness of a Tom Waits to the morose dirges of an Iron & Wine to the sugar-coated superficiality of an Abba. Obviously,
someone like White, who says his three spiritual dads are “his biological
father, God and Bob Dylan” will be closer to my heart. But I downloaded several
of the songs mentioned in the New Yorker
piece by Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. While not my cup of tea, I can see the
attraction. These artists are obviously the direct descendants of the Motown
sound that was organized under very similar lines, with manufactured pop groups
who didn’t write their own music. This artificial and commercial system
nonetheless produced gems such as "You Can't Hurry Love," "Tracks of My Tears," and “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.”

Both White and the Norwegian producer duo
known as “Stargate” belong to elites that produce popular music for the masses. The only difference is that Stargate’s masses are way more massive. But there is also a second difference. White's musical experiments are much less dependent upon the hit machine. Some of his albums can flop and others will do better, but he still has the independence and freedom to fail. The Stargate duo are much more dependent upon the fickle tastes of the mass public. Their flavor of music can fall out of fashion at the drop of a hat. In fact, it already happened to them once, back in the United Kingdom: "

In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. 'People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,' Eriksen told me."The New Yorker feature of the Top 40 wizards ends with a poignant moment when Adele's sweep of the Grammys is discussed:

But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.

The two styles of production inhabit the same moment in time. I would also suggest that White’s
last-man-standing posture of cutting physical strands of tape with a knife might
not be simply the anachronism of an eccentric weirdo. Think more along the
lines of Apple versus Google or locavorism versus molecular gastronomy. A Luddite retro hipster living in
Tennessee like White might just be the flip side of the two Norwegians hunched
over their seventeen-inch screens in midtown Manhattan. In a post-historicist
society, the line between retro and futurist blurs as the past recurs over and
over, and our visions of the future age faster than our furniture. They are
simply two different ways of inserting yourself into the present and the
future.

But, still, I am beginning to wonder whether, in some fields, technological savvy and sophistication
might begin to be correlated with replaceability, and perhaps even lower wages and lower profit margins. Instead of a sine qua non for avoiding obsolescence, technological sophistication
might be the tax you constantly have to pay to maintain your status as a cog in
a mass-production machine. A cog that is progressively paid less and whose output becomes increasingly commoditized.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

I am not going to make the case that Spain
is or isn’t on the brink. My opinion on investment in Spanish public
debt is worth exactly a hill of beans in this crazy world, as well it
should be. But as a language specialist, I would like to point out a few ways
in which this crisis is based on very bad
translations that, in practice, could lead to very flawed investment theses.

Spain might or might not default on its
debt, I don’t know. I just know that when markets were saying that Spanish debt
was almost as good as German debt they were mispricing it. Now, when they say
it is worse than Zimbabwean debt, they might be mispricing it again. Focusing a lot on emotional images of pandemonium of Greeks or
Spaniards throwing paving stones around is gripping, emotional, and targeted
toward the more primitive parts of our brains that are easily moved by that
sort of thing.

Let me provide an example. The general strike in Spain a couple of weeks
ago was widely followed. The unions are obviously strong and command a lot of
following from even people who are not unionized. But the country is far from
close to chaos. The violent incidents in Barcelona were pretty isolated. The
strike in Madrid was a very tranquil day, with the streets mostly occupied by
German tourists in town to support Hannover against Atlético.

Madrid looks pretty normal and boring, as
the weather warms up and springtime is in the air. It is full of tourists doing
touristy things and, in the evening, reveling drunks doing drunky things. On Wednesday
I was coming back from lunch and I bumped into the vice president of the
Spanish government, Soraya Sáenz, chatting with some colleagues outside a
restaurant. There was not a bodyguard in sight.

This is hardly the picture of a
country on the verge of the largest sovereign debt defaults in history and massive
street battles. Of course, my personal observations are purely anecdotal and worthless as investment
intelligence. The bottom line is that the bonfires in Plaza de Catalunya are
equally devoid of value for a real investor in a rational market.

Except we know people aren’t rational and
markets aren’t always efficient. And right now there are a lot of people fueling the
fires of instability to profit on credit default swap bets. And even some of
the less emotional gasoline being poured on the fire--which masquerades as cold,
analytical number-crunching--is based on appallingly poor translations. Take the example of
a PowerPoint presentation that has
circulated heavily through the Internetover the past week. It was drawn up by an
investment company called Carmel Asset Management.

The .ppt document was loudly endorsed by ZeroHedge, a very popular “investment” blog that has a distinctly nihilistic attitude very typical of the trader mentality: the world is insane; politicians always lie; markets are rigged by Goldman Sachs; there is a huge conspiracy against the little investor; Armageddon is just around the corner; the same guys who killed Kennedy control Apple stock; you have to have a bomb shelter in your backyard; and you basically have to be a paranoid sociopath to make an honest buck in the markets. The main author’s handle is “Tyler Durden,” the co-protagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Look at his Twitter account. It features a picture of Brad Pitt with a bare midriff playing Durden. The odds are, of course, that the author is a pale, overweight bald dude called Louie who trades stocks from his living room in “Joysie”. The thing is that, in addition to very analytical blurbs on the problems facing the Spanish economy, ZeroHedge also loves to show images of rioting (viz. “The Spanish RiotCam Has Arrived”). And also of making the parallels between any sort of mayhem in the streets of Madrid or Barcelona with the scenes at Syntagma Square in Athens.

The .ppt makes the bear case
for Spain, the absolute worst-case scenario in which the country simply
defaults on its debt. It points out factors that are undeniable: high
unemployment (23%); unfinished housing crash (perhaps only half over);
spendthrift regional governments; and shaky cajas
overexposed to the housing bubble.

One of the key claims in the presentation
is that Spanish debt is actually much higher than many realize. Theconsensus is that Spanish debt is equivalent to 60% of GDP, which is manageable (sixty
percent is actually lower than the debt-to-GDP ratio of “serious” countries
like Germany [83%], the U.S. [100%], France [87%], the United Kingdom [81%],
and Japan [233%]).

“Aha,” reply the ZeroHedgers and Carmels,
“but that 60% is deceptive, because it does not include the debt owed by the comunidades autónomas, the regional
governments.” The PPT tells us that: “Spain’s national debt is 50% greater than
the headline numbers. Spain’s debt-to-GDP balloons from 60% to 90% of GDP with
regional and other debts (Slide 2).” When you factor that in, the figure, they
claim, is 90%, which is a lot scarier.

Well, it turns out that this is not
actually true. The lower consensus 60% figure is accurate, because it includes
both the money owed by the central government and all the goodies on which regional
authorities splurged throughout the boom of the past decade. Listen to Luis
Garicano, a leading Spanish economist, responding in comments on his blog from a reader
who is freaking out after visiting ZeroHedge:

ZeroHedge
is tying himself into knots. The debt owed by the autonomous regions is ALREADY
included in the public debt total. Banking debt guaranteed by the government
and “other guaranteed debt” is another issue.

So, who you gonna call? The economics
professor who does this for a living (and, incidentally, is not a Spain bull),
or the anonymous blogger who masquerades as the Nietzschean, psychopathic
alter-ego of an alienated insomniac suffering from multiple personality
disorder? I have my answer, but then again I’m an elitist, as some sock puppets
mutter under their breath when they read this blog.

And then you start to probe the detail of
the .ppt document, and the picture shifts a little more. A Wall Street Journal blog carried
a very useful portrait of Carmel, the company making the bearish Spain call. First of all, Carmel manages $50 million. That makes it a very,
very tiny player. Second of all, Jonathan Carmel, the head of the asset
manager, reveals that he writes his own investment research and that his
Spanish is very poor:

While
Mr. Carmel has yet to visit Spain for his research, he says he has spent much
of the past year combing through as many numbers as he can dig up, speaking
with as many people as he can find and reading as much as he can with what he
calls “my pretty bad Spanish.” “I’ve been using a lot of Google Translate,” he
confesses.

So,
basically, we have a manager from a tiny boutique firm who has never visited
Spain and who supplements mediocre language skills with Google Translate. And
this is the research that moves the gigantic bond market that decides the rates
that govern the lives of millions of people. I am not saying that any of this
is evil. After all, Carmel’s PowerPoint very transparently reveals his firm’s interest
in the matter:

We
began buying Spain CDS in Q4 2011 because the country has significant
structural problems within its economy, a debt load that is higher than the
headline number, and a banking system with unrealized losses (Slide no. 10)

This means he is betting on a Spanish
default (probably using massive leverage). Spain doesn’t have to actually go
broke for him to make money. The CDSs only have to go up and his bet will pay
off (if he cashes out in time):

Should
the Spanish crisis flare up in 2012 as we expect, we can generate a 300% return
on the annual premium (Slide no. 10)

Simply put, some of the financial mayhem is
being fed by second-rate research based on machine translation. Markets are increasingly
fueled by this ever-greater mass of information that is easily available.
According to the data worshippers, this will only end up being to our benefit. And
language automation will only make the world an even better place by providing
approximate translations of this data. But that is a stupid illusion. Seeing grown men spout that silliness is the equivalent of watching those creepy middle-aged men at comic book conventions who still play with Star Wars figures. Because in investment, "close-enough" translation is actually "wrong" translation.

In financial
markets, it is increasingly evident that greater information is not providing
more rational markets that are better fed with accurate information. On the
contrary, what we have is more noise. Noise like the one currently being
generated by ZeroHedge and Carmel for their own selfish ends using low quality translations
(anonymous blogs don’t have to disclose their positions in the markets, by the
way). The Google translations used by Carmel are not capable of providing the
fine points of financial data that can be better conveyed by a human
translation.

As such, the reams of Spanish-language data
translated into mediocre English and consumed by Carmel’s analysts are
the equivalent of the stock-trading algorithms that are producing more and more
frequent flash crashes.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The following message was posted this week to
an old item from a few months back
on the ProZ-TAUS debate, in which the Holy Trinity of L10N
Automation was convened to recite the by now stale message that translators
will not be replaced by computers (only degraded). It is an interesting
testimony because it is a counter to my thesis that post-editing will be
accompanied by lower absolute rates (i.e., both per word and per day, month,
and year). Check it:

Hi
guys,

I
realize this comment is really late, but speaking of PE payment, I just
finished a 2 year PE project that actually put some decent bucks in my coffers
and was so incredibly easy for someone with my experience and education in translation.
(10 yrs. experience, MA translation).

At
the volume I could do on it (paid at discounted word rate), I earned about 100
bucks per hour. However, I agreed to it only because of the major concession on
quality. This stuff was all internal and would not be published, so they didn't
care about the quality. They asked for "understandable" and
"good enough" quality.

"Good
enough" and "understandable" are subjective. I often found many
of the garbled, yet decipherable, sentences simply "good enough." ;-)

No
complaints from them.

However,
I have had agencies approach me with projects that need to be publishing
quality--and they want a discount for MT--my response is usually to look at the
MT version, find it unusable and needing of complete re-translation and offer
them 2 options:

1)
inflated word rate by 50% if they insist on use of the MT.

2)
regular rate if they want it translated from scratch.

Needless
to say, I don't normally get chosen for these kinds of ridiculous proposals.
;-)

MT
can be used well on the type of project I described, which I just finished
doing. It all depends on the content and the purpose of the target text.

I
personally think that MT has no place in publishing quality work--not yet at
least. No matter how many strides they make in MT, they are a loooooooooooong
way off from replacing humans.

Whether
PE becomes a viable market strategy will be up to us translators. I did it for
a bunch of easy, repetitive internal garbage that is of interest only to the C
suits of a particular company--and made very decent dough. (I also did not lose
my style--I can still translate at proper quality too.)

If it
becomes the standard for publishing quality work, well, I'll be looking for
another profession.

Sorry
for the anonymous post, I don't want this client to make a guess at who I am if
they happen to stumble on this.

Great
blog!

I don’t doubt this testimony is genuine.
However, I doubt that $100-per-hour of post-editing is in the cards for many
individual translators in the future. Two observations are in order:

1.- The market for translations is very
inefficient. I won’t go into the theoretical meaning of economic inefficiency,
but I will only point out a symptom of that inefficiency. Any translator can
confirm this: Rates offered vary insanely from one job offer to another, by
factors of 100% or more. Not even websites such as ProZ have managed to
constrain the spectrum of translation prices. I already hear some ninny raising
his hand to say: “Of course rates vary. That is true of any market. Rates will
vary according to language pair, experience, difficulty, specialization,
volume, regularity, etc., etc.” As usual, this is a truism that papers over the
fact that a variation of one or two orders of magnitude is way too large for a
rational market.

2.- In an inefficient market, there will be
huge outliers. Our anonymous poster is just such an outlier. My bet is that, in
the future, competition among cheap translation providers will tend to reduce
the occurrence of such outliers. This $100-per-hour rate is an inefficiency
that will be gradually scraped away as one or two or three low quality players
become slightly more dominant in their niche. (Incidentally, the fact that the
author of the message maintains his contribution anonymous confirms this. His
suspicion is that if his clients discovered that the same tweaking of MT output
can be obtained at a much, much lower price, they would turn to another
provider… because the service is a commodity.)

I agree with the anonymous author that
there is not a place for MT in material for publication… yet. There would be, perhaps,
if the MT people got serious about quality metrics. That way, when I came into
the office in the morning, with my Starbucks venti and munching on a croissant,
and read 57% accuracy, I would simply eject the refuse into hyperspace and greedily
keep the 95% matches. But since some MT specialists have claimed on this very
blog that any Google Translate match is equivalent to a 95% Trados match, you
will forgive me if I remain a skeptic.

I wish I were wrong. If I am, and I end up
as a post-editor making $100 an hour, I’ll be right there with you, oh
anonymous contributor, filling up jacuzzis with Cristal, raising the roof, and lighting
Cuban cigars with one-hundred-euro bills while Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” blares in
the background. I will gladly sell my soul, sans sales tax, if
any such there is to sell.

But I truly, truly doubt that this will
happen. The impetus behind cheap translation is precisely to lower quality
expectations and make the entire process as cheap as possible. You might think
that this is irrational, but the business model simply depends on volume, which
is why these companies are trying to convince Fortune 500 corporations to
translate Facebook status updates.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Friday, April 6, 2012

I’m not a big fan of anonymity in general.
I take it for granted that you are not really putting yourself in any danger by
expressing your opinions about something as wimpy as translation. And if you
feel that expressing an opinion might endanger your career, you should simply
abstain from expressing that opinion. You shouldn’t have it both ways, because
the quality of someone’s opinion is related to the degree to which you are
willing to stand by it with your real name. Moreover, I feel that, unless you
are the employee of a company that might retaliate against you, you are being
cowardly. There is clearly a link between anonymity and troll-like behavior, a
major problem in current Internet culture.

As
with everyone else, I'm equally appalled by the way in which this contract has
been handled to ALS - who are clearly incapable of managing it and who are
trying to pay peanuts to qualified staff.

I
disagree however with the vindictive way in which Gavin has been portrayed. The
issue is with the MOJ who have awarded this contract to a company incapable of
managing. MOJ have clearly sanctioned a huge drop in payments to our
interpreters who do a fantastic job - assuming they had done their research
(which maybe they hadn't) then their cost analysis would clearly dictate the
drop that the interpreters would need to take in order for the arrangement to
be viable. Why is there such an attack on the small guy? He's running a
business - there are thousands of agencies out there - (most of whom however
work fantastically with the linguists and pay them well) and he's won a
lucrative deal. The issue is not with him but with the MOJ for ever selling off
such an important service.

You
will get no where personnally attacking Gary Wheeldon - you need to aim your
criticisms at those who count and make the decisions.

There are several things to observe about
this message right off the bat, but I would like to highlight a key sentence.
The author of the message (remember: cowering behind a wall of anonymity) says
that no animus should be directed at ALS boss Gavin Wheeldon because he is just
one more entrepreneur that was lucky enough to snag a nice little contract for
his company:

He's
running a business - there are thousands of agencies out there - (most of whom
however work fantastically with the linguists and pay them well) and he's won a
lucrative deal. The issue is not with him but with the MOJ for ever selling off
such an important service.

In a nutshell, that is the problem with the
Cheap Translation model. Nowadays, an agency is often just a sales team (of
monolingual English speakers) and a stable of project managers (usually located
in Eastern Europe). The sales people hook the bait (at any price), reel in the customer,
and then turn the whole project over to the PMs, who look up a random name on the
database and then try to arm wrestle the lowest possible rate from the bumbling
“vendor.”

The ALS debacle is the same dubious model
multiplied by a factor of 3,000. The author of the anonymous message seems to
imply that, even though ALS didn’t actually have a parallel database of
qualified interpreters, it was fully entitled to go out and snag the
mega-contract from the Ministry of Justice. Here is where I differ from the contributor's complacent
view of McLocalization.

An
ethical businessperson would have told the MoJ that undertaking a
responsibility as large as providing thousands of interpreters would take
years. Moreover, to cut people’s wages in half overnight was not realistic. The
system should have been phased in over a period of at least five years, if not
more.

The decision to jump at the MoJ contract at
any cost and under any circumstance clearly was a case of a tiny, ravenous
amoeba trying to bite off more than it could possibly chew in a million years (in
this case, a morsel of food approximately the size of a killer whale).

My point is that this was both bad business
and bad ethics. However, people like Mr. Wheeldon, who first get the contract
and then worry about how to meet the service (by his own admission to the Times), are totally devoid of ethics.
E-T-H-I-C-S. Business is not just about
closing the deal. It is also about being qualified to provide the best possible
service for a reasonable rate. The prevalence of people such as Mr.
Wheeldon (and their chummy tolerance by people such as my sock puppet) is
symptomatic of what is wrong with the l10n industry: shady businesspeople who
think translation is a commodity service that simply consists in matching a
project from a faceless online customer to an online translator profile cribbed
from ProZ.com. I am guessing the author of the message is the head of such a
pirate outfit, perhaps looking to intercept an unsuspecting container ship somewhere close to the Horn of Africa.

True, the MoJ’s flying civil servants do
not come in for a drubbing from me, but on the other hand they do not parade
around on reality shows to flaunt their raging sociopathic tendencies. Yes, the
civil servants should have done more due diligence. Simply auditing ALS’s
database of interpreters and doing a dry run of the system in one or two
regions would perhaps have alerted them to the feasibility of doing all of
this. So, in that sense, they are equally responsible for this mess. Perhaps
they did so due to the pressure from their political masters. When I hear the
comments from the entity called “Crispin Blunt” about the whole mess, it
becomes quite apparent that there was acute pressure from the Cabinet to make a
transparently awful decision due to the urgency of making budget cuts.

Yes, Mr. Wheeldon is not the only culprit
in this mess, but the moral instincts he reveals in the media are a major
factor in this entire tragic catastrophe. And the reigning professional
standards among the many “thousands of agencies” cited by the anonymous
contributor, who see nothing wrong with Wheeldon’s modus operandi, should be a
matter for concern.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

It is if you’re the Russian Mafia, perhaps,
and you need to send a scam letter to millions of people in different
languages. Or if you market under-the-counter Viagra. Or if you are the widow
of an African dictator who was executed by a firing squad and you need someone abroad to set up a wire transfer. However, if your
business model is even marginally dependent on brand image, you should think
twice about going down the road of cheap translation providers.

The Low Quality Translation movement’s
slogan that “any translation is better than no translation” is tantamount to
claiming that if you can’t afford house paint, you might as well smear dog poop
on your walls.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.